Art

Lola Flash’s retrospective at Pen + Brush, 1986 to Present, honors creative activism at its finest. As a queer black woman, Flash, at age 59, has used the medium of photography and photographic processes to confront the dual injustice of invisibility and stereotypical portrayals of gender, sexuality, race, and age for over three decades.

Art

In advance of his exhibition at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Ketchup as a Vegetable, Blalock paid a visit to the Rail HQ for a conversation with Charlie Schultz that ranged from Blalock’s formative years, to his perspective-broadening experience of Moby Dick, to the way his new work (somewhat) describes the off-kilter quality of our contemporary moment.

Art

“The beginning of the “Wall of Light” paintings came when I was sitting on a beach in Mexico in Zihuatanejo. I’d been visiting the ruins and I was in a moment of repose, so I made a little watercolor that was a memory portrait of my impression of what I’d been doing.”

I urgently feel this is the time for artists and curators to work together in a timely manner to meet the viewer’s intelligence and sensibility. May clarity in language and swiftness in execution be the strength of our endeavors.

Creativity is an elaborate game of connect the dots where you can’t actually see the dots, you have to infer them. Moreover, these dots are charged with emotional and autobiographical significance. From a psychoanalytic perspective we might say that you keep yourself from seeing them. I asked ten remarkably creative and accomplished people in a wide range of professional practices to write down a few thoughts about creativity. Where does it come from? Does it apply to any realm of endeavor? Can we teach it? Are our institutions nurturing it?